Flux Pavilion

[DUBSTEP] Joshua Steele, the English dubstep DJ known as Flux Pavilion, looks almost exactly like Billie Joe Armstrong. It makes sense. Faced with a declining pop-punk scene in the late ’90s, Armstrong dyed his hair black and colored his music in dark, anthemic shades and pre-packaged it for a wider, more desperate, more Top 40-friendly audience. Dubstep artists are faced with a similar decline in the heart of their genre. Do artists like Shackleton decompile the fundamentals of the complex dubstep beat and explore the textures a la Reich? Or do they, like Flux Pavilion, simply try to vibrate your molly-eating face off with dive bombs from squeaky radar sounds into booming bass explosions? A tip of the hat to the artsy Shackleton, but sometimes it’s nice to be pulverized by an unpretentious synth or two.